It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I think we deserved to be--though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not because we had ideas about life, but because we had _such_ ideas--so smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what, if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts; selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour; honest introspection would have revealed to any one of us a handful of impulsive good deeds to show against a lifetime of petty greedy actions the motives for which had been painstakingly disguised: yet, by and large, we believed, really did believe, that the world was growing steadily better, that there was more good than evil in human nature (by which, if we had been honest and intelligent, each of us could only have meant in the nature of every one save himself), that certain things (of which every one of us was capable) simply were not done by decent people, and that, given the high state of moral progress in the world, wars were unthinkable. The shock of the awakening (which did not come at its fullest during the war, when thought was suspended, but afterward) was tremendous and painful. And the pain and anger were all the worse for being, even if we recognized it but dimly, directed against ourselves. That was the secret of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling ‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty; a man who is afraid to leave his wife and his friend alone together is a man with whom his friend’s wife would not be safe. The disillusionment, then, was potentially salutary. Stripping men of false ideas and ideals, it forced them to look into their own hearts. Only potentially salutary, however. In its first results it was sheerly destructive; and this, too, was logical. The great Chicago fire of 1871 was doubtless a good thing in that it wiped out a sordid and ugly city, but the first reaction to it of the inhabitants must have been despair. Despair, at any rate, was the prevailing emotion in the hearts of most thinking members of the minority during the chaotic period that followed the Armistice. All these centuries to work with, and we had achieved--this!